Jan & Phil Wilkes

“While we were talking to them, a couple of young men stopped and said they had found a car out there in the field a ways away all smashed up with a couple inside.”

Jan and I were visiting her parents’ farm out at S.W. 61st and Wanamaker, just east of where Washburn Rural high School is. We were in town from Lawrence — we were students at KU — to make the final plans for our wedding, which was to take place four days later on June 12 in Topeka. We just started eating, the siren (sounded) and then the (radio) announcer came on saying a tornado had been spotted on the ground southwest of Topeka.

It sounded pretty close to where we were on the farm, so we got in our vehicles. We all drove up to the intersection of S.W. 61st and Wanamaker. Once we got there, we had blacktop road in four directions. No matter which way the tornado was coming we could drive away from it in any direction. We got up to the corner and looked to the west. We saw a huge — it almost looked like a hydrogen mushroom cloud off in the distance. We watched it as it traveled northeast toward Burnett’s Mound.

Jan’s father, her brother and I all got in the pickup truck and drove out to Auburn Road to see if anybody needed help. We first encountered a couple of newer ranch houses that were built right next to each other on the west side of Auburn Road, and both houses were demolished. We yelled to see if anyone responded. The first house nobody responded, so we moved over to the second house. As we were yelling, a couple came up from the basement. The only thing left standing of the house was the garage. Their car inside the garage had been moved all the way over to the left-hand side of the garage up against the garage door, and all of the chrome was stripped off the car.

We were talking to them, and they were asking us if we knew what happened to the couple (Calvin and Clarice Wolf) that lived next door. While we were talking to them, a couple of young men stopped and said they had found a car out there in the field a ways away all smashed up with a couple inside. Turned out it was the couple that lived next door. Instead of coming over to their neighbor’s house like they’d been invited to do if there was ever a tornado, they tried to get away in their car and the tornado apparently picked the car up, carried it out into the field west of the house, smashed it up and killed them.